Animation Mentor has Begun

So my Animation Mentor journey has finally officially begun. On Monday I got to access the full campus, and got to see who my mentor would be, as well as my classmates. I spoke to a couple of them that day. There are actually 5 people in my class from around me, so that's pretty cool.

My mentor is Jon Collins, an animator at Pixar :) There are actually a lot of Pixar animators teaching the Basic Foundations class, including Victor Navone. We got to meet him formally last night in the Q&A. He seems like a pretty cool guy and was encouraging to us over the camera not to be shy our first time. I was a bit scared before I went up, but it's not so bad. I think I'll get used to it pretty quick.

No homework really, just set up our profiles and introduce ourselves to our mentor. Done and done. I've since watched the whole lecture, which was basically just an introduction, and the Maya training videos. I installed the AM tools, which is pretty cool. I never realized how customizable Maya was until I watched the training videos. Shame those kinds of tutorials aren't floating around the net, I learned more in 5 minutes from that, than from anything I read online. So with the first character, and a pretty basic knowledge of Maya I went and created a pose based off a stick figure I had in my sketch book. Practice for next week's assignment ;)

Tada!

I have to say, I think I prefer FK over IK just a little. I find that I can get more control over the position of the arm quicker, than in FK. I can get it in a general position pretty quick with IK, but to make finer adjustments to it, I find that FK is better for me. I also like how the arm follows the body as well when you translate the whole body, where in IK the hand stays stationary and the arm bends to conform to this. I can see some applications for that though, but I still prefer FK.

Well, I'll let you know how it goes from here.